


Dig Your Own Hole

by vinylroad



Category: Vampire Diaries (TV)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-12-20
Updated: 2010-12-20
Packaged: 2017-10-13 20:10:59
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,467
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/141299
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/vinylroad/pseuds/vinylroad
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In so many ways, Damon is nothing like his brother.  There's a hole deep inside of him that Katherine can feel in her blood, an emptiness she feels echoed in herself, something waiting to be filled.  Wanting to be filled.  His smiles are sharp, hiding nothing from her, all his emotions at play on his face, his happiness and sorrow so present it's as if she can touch it when he lets her fingers fall to his face.  He kisses her hand as politely as his brother, but there's something dark there too, a craving that feels familiar and safe.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Dig Your Own Hole

**Author's Note:**

  * For [perculious](https://archiveofourown.org/users/perculious/gifts).



When Damon asks Katherine what she did, the first thing she did as a vampire on the first night she was turned, she lies.  She lies because it's easy, because she's spent over three hundred years lying and it's more than second nature now.  She lies because she knows for certain now that he loves her, that she can be the darkest version of herself and he'd still welcome her with open arms.  She thinks he might prefer it, actually: prefers the dark side of herself that she keeps from Stefan and hides from the rest of the world, unless they're seconds away from leaving it at the end of her teeth.

So she lies.

She says, "I ate a pretty little farm girl," and leaves it at that.

(This is the truth:

Katerina buries her parents.  With her new strength, she can easily lift her father, a man whose brute force she had become frighteningly accustomed to in her childhood.  Now, limp as a doll in her arms, she feels nothing but pity for him.  He had been a man generous with his cruelty and tightfisted with kindness, but he had been her father, and not even her disownment had released her from her daughterly mourning.  This is a part of herself that not even her death could kill, and for that, she is truly angry. 

Her mother is next, her arms hanging dead from her body, swaying with the movement of Katerina carrying her.  She touches her mother's hands before she lowers her into the hole she dug herself.  They're not the hands of the woman who held the social position that her mother did: hard and weathered, the rough, calloused skin stretched over her fingers.  These were the hands of a kind woman, a good woman who had been a good mother, but had chosen to be a dutiful wife first.

When she's done, the front of her dress and breasts are covered in the tacky, drying blood of the remnants of her family.  She watches their bodies being swallowed by the dark earth near the edge of their estate and she feels a sorrow that takes root underneath her, threatening to drag her down.  Letting the last of her humanity bleed out of her body is easy, buried deep in the dirt with her family.

Then she tries to find her daughter.  When the search proves fruitless, her progeny gone, whisked away by the church to hide her sins, she tears apart the countryside, turns the dirt roads blood red with her fury.)

\--

Katerina never meets her daughter, never learns her name or her fate.  But she comes to learn her descendants, the rich curse of her bloodline.

\--

There are lots of myths.  It takes her centuries to learn them all, to sort fact from fiction, the truth usually somewhere in between.

Katerina is the first Petrova doppelgänger.  Elena, the sixth.

The second is born in Austria when Katerina turns one hundred and one, still looking not a day over seventeen.  Her name is Liesl, and the first time Katerina meets her, she's thirty-five years old, working as a prostitute in Enns.  Katerina can't stop looking at her, the age that she will never see on her own face written instead across Liesl's. 

The third doppelgänger is named Katherine Pierce.  Her husband and children succumb to the black plague before Katerina arrives in London in June of 1665, their bodies left wrapped in cloth outside the mausoleum on their estate.  She finds Katherine in her palatial home, now quarantined, a red cross marked on the door, _Lord have mercy on us_ scrawled beneath, lying sick in her bed.  A quick death is the mercy that Katerina extends to Katherine.  It's easy enough after to play the part of Katherine, dress in her clothes and wear her perfume, inherit the extensive wealth of her dearly departed husband.  She is surprised at how easy it is to shed her old name, her old life.  She hasn't been Katerina in two hundred years; it is a name only known by the dead.

Katherine doesn't meet the fourth and fifth doppelgängers.  By the time they're born, the breadth of her descendants is massive, the branches of her family tree dividing off endlessly.  She only learns about Elena through Isobel.  The irony of her descendents taking root in the town she almost razed to the ground, of one of her persecutors' blood being mixed in with her own in the latest doppelgänger, is not lost on her.  History has a habit of repeating itself, of returning to the scene of the crime to punish her.

\--

Katherine meets Stefan first.  He's an interesting mirror of his father, a stoicism she yearns to tear apart, to corrupt and bleed out.  Stefan smiles easily, but he guards his thoughts and feelings carefully, tucked deep, away from her.  His perfect veneer is shiny and thick, always a presentable gentleman and dutiful son, even in his minor rebellions, and he builds himself on a strong, unshakable foundation that she finds challenging to crack.  He courts her chastely at first, as if she's a proper lady, a potential wife and mother, and she lets him, the novelty of it still thrilling even after three hundred years.

In so many ways, Damon is nothing like his brother.  There's a hole deep inside of him that Katherine can feel in her blood, an emptiness she feels echoed in herself, something waiting to be filled.  Wanting to be filled.  His smiles are sharp, hiding nothing from her, all his emotions at play on his face, his happiness and sorrow so present it's as if she can touch it when he lets her fingers fall to his face.  He kisses her hand as politely as his brother, but there's something dark there too, a craving that feels familiar and safe.  His is a foundation built on tinder, ready to collapse or burst into flames.

She meets Stefan first, but she breaks Damon first. 

\--

Damon looks just like him, the same cavalier smile, the same sharp jaw, the same light eyes and dark hair.  The man who had been bethrothed to another, but who had persued her, made her fall in love with him so he could part her thighs, take what he wanted.  Gave her a child that had been taken from her, that had taken everything from her, claimed loved, but had abandoned her without a second thought.  She alternately hates and loves it: a sharp, painful reminder of her past, but this time a rendition where she holds the power, where she extracts the things she wants, the things she desires.

The first time she fucks Damon, she's vicious.  Her nails leave score marks along his chest that seep little drips of blood that she chases with her tongue as his hand wraps itself in her hair, his lungs tripping to find air, his cock growing hard against her.  He doesn't protest at the pain, rather encourages her, hands himself over to her without a second thought, oxygen feeding her fire.  Nothing gets her off quite like power.

He's better than she expects, good with his hands and his mouth, even better with his cock.  She comes once with his mouth between her thighs.  She's shocked more than anything else; it's been a while since a man has done this to her without her having to compel him to first, something she doesn't enjoy doing.  Katherine's always preferred wielding her human powers of persuasion to get what she wants, something proven easy with Damon.  He doesn't even bother removing her from the corset or the light underskirt, just settles her over his lap, over the open vee of his pants until she feels him push up into her, stretching her wide, just a hint of pain through the satisfaction slithering through her.

Sex is complicated as a vampire.  Katherine's had centuries to hone her abilities and even she struggles to keep her baser instincts in check, to keep from slipping over the threshold of her control.  Too much bleeds between sex and the hunger, the urge to fuck and feed intertwined.

So when Damon whispers, "I know what you are," his fingers digging into her thighs as she rides him, her long hair tickling over her shoulders, she wonders if her eyes have begun to turn.  A quick slip of her tongue over her teeth reveals the normal, blunt edges of human teeth.  Her eyes snap to his face, narrowing as she stills.

"What?" she hisses, one of her palms falling onto his chest as his hips bump up into her, his cock filling her, urging her to continue. 

"Please," he whines, his confession suddenly lost to his need, closing his eyes as his hips continue to beg up against her, turning his head so his neck is bared to her.  She can see the pulse running through his neck, the delicate beat of his heart right there under his jaw.

Her fangs come out - a reflex - and she isn't sure if it's the threat of his discovery or the promise of fresh blood.  She could compel him to forget after, but it worries her only that he knows, that he's figured out what she is, as if she's been lazy in her deception.  This is a con she's perfected over near three hundred years, and though she's been found out over the years, particularly in her vampire adolescence, the stupid, irresponsible feeling of invincibility that first comes with the change, he is the first to ever confess his discovery to her.

When she starts moving again, allowing his hips to rock her into a new, hard rhythm that barrels her right into an orgasm, he turns back to face her, opening his eyes.  One of his hands skims up her side, along her arm and breast, throat and chin, until the pad of his index finger brushes against her fang.

"I love you," Damon says, and she can't help herself, can't help leaning over and sinking her fangs into his throat, biting deep as he bucks up and comes inside of her, wet and messy.  He holds her as she feeds from him, arms laced around her waist, his release starting to slide stickily down from inside of her.

When she finally lets go, licks at the little wounds in his neck, she moves to sit up, perching over him.  His blood is dripping down her chin, falling down across her breasts still bound in the corset.

Damon hesitates only for the briefest second before leaning up to kiss her.

\--

(This is something she has told no one:

The first person she kills as a vampire is the father of her child.

She savors the way his eyes widen at the sight of her fangs, the choked sound he lets out when she bites him, rips viciously into his throat.  The light gurgle as he begins to asphyxiate on his own blood, as she takes back her power from him, takes back everything he had ever stolen from her.  She doesn't bleed him dry, instead opting to watch him drown in his own blood, the only fitting punishment for his crimes.)

\--

Katherine has lived in a neverending number of cities, of small, nameless towns.  She has lived a thousand different lives, endless variations of herself, of devout Catholic and sadistic heathen, dutiful wife and debauched mistress, coy submissive and controlling dominate.  She's learned that people see what they want to see regardless of her true intentions, regardless of the reality sitting in front of them.  She's learned that she can become whomever she needs to be, whomever she wants to be.

And that despite its rather unfortunate location, Mystic Falls gives birth to a Katherine that she enjoys with a distinct relish.  This is the most organic version of herself, outside the prim, proper lady required amongst the townfolk, the person she is with Damon and Stefan doesn't feel like an act, doesn't feel like she's picking and choosing her persona in the way she has done almost her entire life.

Stefan requires more manipulation, more harsh persuasion to do her bidding.  But Damon.  Damon requires nothing more than a brief touch and a flickering smile.

Underneath her, Damon squirms, his eyes glassy and mouth struggling to draw breath into his lungs.  His hands fist in the crisp sheets beneath them as hers presses against the line of his throat, turning the already pale skin a stark white.  But he doesn't try to get away, doesn't try to break her grip.

"Do you like it when I hurt you?" Katherine asks, finally lifting the pressure, listening to the rapid beat of his heart trying to rush the fresh oxygen from his greedy lungs.

His hands are on her hips then, dipping down, wrestling with the silly layers of her skirt, searching for the skin underneath.

"Yes," he says breathlessly, without hesitation.  His fingers slide up inside of her ruthlessly, thick and perfectly curved.

After, when his cock lies limply against her thigh, streaking slick with come across her skin, she uses one of the sharp pins usually holding up her perfectly tamed hair to cut herself across the breast.  Damon starts to speak, his eyes gone wide, and she knows he's protesting only the fear he has that she's hurting herself, not what she's sure he knows is coming next.  She hushes him, feeling her blood starting to seep generously from her wound.

In the end, she doesn't even need to instruct him, his head bending down out of instinct to lap at the crimson cut.

\--

She brings Damon along on hunts, even though Pearl vocally disapproves, and continues her campaign for an immediate departure.  Katherine's long since decided to turn the Salvatore brothers before they leave Mystic Falls, and trying to teach one fledgling, let alone two, while travelling is next to impossible.  Stefan would never do this, but Damon joins her without compulsion, hiding in the bushes as she dispatches the two footmen, drains the rich, drunk merchant inside the carriage before he has time to blink.

"Always stop drinking before the heart stops," she says, wiping at her mouth.  She smiles as she licks the man out of her teeth.  "And no witnesses."

He's been drinking her blood every day for several weeks, has come to crave it even though she's sure the taste of it is still disgusting to him.  He pulls back the frilly collar of her light coat, running his fingers over the bare skin revealed by the low cut of her dress, the tight press of the whalebone hidden in her corset.  His favourite place to feed.  So she lets him, hands him the little knife and murmurs encouragement to him as he brings it up to her breast and presses down.

Back at the house, in his bed, with her blood in his system, he's stronger than he normally is, a quiet violence hidden in his arms and hands.  The thrill of the kill has worked its way into his system, too, and she can taste the adrenaline in his sweat.  Once he changes, he'll be magnificent, she thinks.  She can already feel the dark side of him pushing through his submissive side, his need to please.

He holds her underneath him as he fucks her, and she lets him, allows his hand to cradle her wrists above her head.  She feels out of control, unwound in a way that should make her fearful.

 _I love you_ , he hisses as he comes, dropping his head into the crook of her neck, finding the line of her throat with his teeth and biting down.

\--

Katherine sees Damon once after she leaves Mystic Falls.

1979 finds her in New York City via Chicago and Philadelphia.  Klaus hasn't stopped looking for her, but the world has changed and she's adapted to it, using the anonymity of the larger cities to hide, to disappear into the mass of humans mindlessly milling, going about their daily business, oblivious to the strangers surrounding them.  No one remembers faces in cities.

It's a split second, in _Studio 54_ , just another summer Saturday night.  Katherine's just fed on a slim redhead in the bathroom, the quaaludes in the girl's system now coursing through hers.  Drugs are almost better experienced second-hand, more of the pleasure and less of the hard come down, and Katherine's normally sharp sense are dulled, softened by the high.

She feels him before she sees him, the light tingle of awareness in the back of her brain; normally she would have sensed him a mile away, the familiar energy of those she has turned, but the haze of the drugs are making it hard for her to focus.

Katherine almost doesn't recognize him, and for a brief moment, she wonders if she's seeing things, the odd victim that comes back to haunt her when she's feeling particularly maudlin.  This is not the Damon she remembers at all, the eager student and pliant lover.  This Damon wears his indifference as blatantly as he once wore his emotions, a thick cloak that she can feel hiding a deep darkness below, a mean streak she can taste off of him in the air.  It's delicious, and she feels herself go wet between the thighs, her fangs already out, brushing against her lower lip.

By the time he looks, she's already gone.

\--

The first time Damon kisses her in almost one hundred and fifty years, it's not for her.

He touches her face, tilts her head so he can deepen the kiss, gentle press his tongue into her mouth.  Katherine can feel a stirring in her gut, an age-old feeling that she's forgotten, of Damon and his obedient love.  But this - this is not for her. 

She doesn't know why it makes her angry, but it does, an anger that singes itself right down into her bones.  An anger not only levelled at Damon, but at herself for the stupid, silly jealousies that she hasn't been able to shake, the rancid leftover bits of her humanity that trap her, make her vulnerable.  After, inside the house, John Gilbert's pathetic confession lingering between them, she enjoys cutting off his pretty little fingers a bit more than she expects to.

\--

Later.  Later, when she feels Damon grow hard against her thigh, his mouth at her breast under her torn shirt, just like all the times he fed from her as a human, she goes in for the kill.  He pulls back, guides her hands out from under his shirt and starts mumbling, starts rambling about time and love, the anger and darkness she once saw gone back into a shell of insecurity and fear.

Katherine doesn't know what Elena has done to him, taken the man she had built and mutilated the parts of him she had cherished most, undone her work with both brothers.

"I just need the truth.  Just once."

So she tells a half-truth.  And a lie.  She tells him what he needs to hear, even if it's not what he wants to hear.  Tapping into the part of Damon that will always believe himself second best, believe himself unworthy of the things he wants.  She's been waiting five hundred years for this, planning and plotting, and she's more than willing to sacrifice for it.

 _I've never loved you.  It was always Stefan._

\--

Damon tracks her back from the tomb.  All Katherine can smell is the dirt from it on her body, the moist, dead earth that she can feel under her fingernails and in her hair.  She wants nothing more than to be free of this place, this prison.

Halfway through the cemetery, she stops, pausing by a gaudy, ancient tombstone, no doubt belonging to one of the founders of the wretched little town.  When Damon realizes she's waiting for him, he finally steps out of the shadows, moving until she can smell the blood of the originals still lingering on him, even through the blood soaked into her own clothes, covering her skin.  Everything smells like death, and she covets it, reminding herself of her victory, only slightly bitter in her mouth.

"You could have killed her.  You could have let him kill her and been free," he says experimentally, like he's trying to work out the logic himself right in front of her.  "You didn't."

Katherine doesn't answer.  She knows what they were expecting, that she would make the trade, that she would help Klaus break the curse to save her own skin, to ensure a pardon.  But she's had five hundred years to think about the crimes he committed against her, the things he took from her: her life, her family, her freedom.  In her life she's had too many things stolen from her, taken by force without her consent.  And despite the depths of her inhumanity, she has been unable to restrain the entirely human need for revenge.  For retribution for her family and for herself.

And she had taken it.  She had ripped it out of their throats and chests, Klaus and his family, the originals.

"There's more to freedom than a lack of threat," she explains.

"What happened to you?" Damon asks.  There's concern in his voice, but she can tell immediately how much he's trying to hide it.  It surprises her how much he's come to sound like Stefan, the same careful, contained tone to his voice when he isn't knee-deep in sarcastic detachment.  He's gotten better at hiding his emotions, hiding his true thoughts.

This is the only time she will be truly merciful, she thinks.  The parts of herself that were good, that could feel anything beyond the constant drumbeat of her self-preservation instinct, are long gone.  She's only come to realize now that they died long before she did.

"I don't trust people who love me," Katherine says slowly, watching the crushed bones in her left wrist start to heal. "No one has ever loved me without a price.  Without wanting to take something from me."

In a second, he's standing beside her, close enough that he could reach out and touch her if he wanted to.  He doesn't.  "Why him.  Why _Stefan_?"

He once asked for truth and she had given him a lie.  Katherine knows this will most likely be the last time she sees him, so she doesn't bother lying.  The truth, just this once.  "Because I knew he'd never love me back."

Damon looms over her.  She's older and stronger than he is, but she's weak from a less than robust feeding schedule and the vicious wounds Klaus inflicted on her before she ended him.  She's pretty sure that if he wanted to, Damon could do her harm.  He doesn't, though, just stands close enough that she can feel the energy of his body brushing up against her.

"Do you like it when he hurts you?" Damon asks.  His voice makes it sound like he's smiling, but when she looks, he's not.  Not at all.

So instead, she smiles.  But it feels anaemic, only surface-deep.

\--

No matter what Katherine tells herself, she's surprised to see him.  It's been nearly ten years since Mystic Falls, since she last saw him disappear into the dark.  Time without end quickly loses its worth; ten years means almost nothing to her anymore, but she knows in the lives of humans, and by extension those who choose to love them, a decade is a significant stretch of time.

This isn't a chance encounter like the club in New York City, this is a deliberate meeting.  She's felt his presence around her for the past few days, trailing her through the hot, humid streets of Miami, the tacky neon glow of a thousand street signs for a thousand clubs with thousands of pretty, half-naked people drunk and high and ready to be eaten.  She's been here for several months and has grown to appreciate the hedonistic side of the city, the beauty of its moonlit beaches and opulent, unashamed wealth.

It's Saturday night, the lithe stretch of time between the night and the wee hours of the morning, and the music from the club is so loud that she's pretty sure Damon doesn't even hear her move toward him, hidden in the shadows behind _Cameo_ , feeding off a pretty little thing whose blood she can smell in the air.  Damon does feel her eventually as she closes the space between them, and the boy he's drained drops to the ground, Damon stepping over the corpse gingerly, carefully avoiding the blood that has spilt off the blond boy's body on its way to the ground.  She knows he's been waiting for her.

This is not the same man she saw ten years ago, the cold indifference she remembers from New York City back in his eyes, in the drag of his heels against the pavement slick with the warm remnants of rain.  This time, however, it's clearly aimed at her.  This is not a man that loves her, that remembers loving her, and she feels herself perversely drawn to him, to the hurt she sees hidden in his eyes that belongs to a girl that looks like her, but who isn't.

"She chose Stefan," Katherine says, and his face darkens with a pain she recognizes far too well.  She's reminded of when she first met him, when he was young and human and hadn't learned how to lie, how to keep things from her.  But she knows this: he wants what Elena had been to him at first, a substitute for the thing he wants but cannot have.

 _You were always my favourite,_ she thinks.  She was never built for love anyway, only the remainder of some unfinished equation inside of her trying to cruelly express itself, like the existence of the Petrova doppelgängers themselves, a life whose sole purpose is to die.

The way he stands - feet steady and apart, arms at his sides, knees slightly bent - lets her know immediately that he's expecting a fight, that he's almost inviting it.   She kisses him instead, a warm, strange burst of affection for the wounded animal in front of her.  His pain is familiar in a way that nothing else has ever been, like coming home.  She'll hurt him again and he'll let her because his punishment is the same as hers: they will never learn how to love the right people.

"Katherine," he says thickly, breaking the kiss but keeping his eyes closed.  His hands cut into the flesh of her arms with just enough pressure to hurt a bit.  She smiles.

"Katerina," she corrects.

In her life, love stories are only tragedies told in reverse.


End file.
